T. Rowe goes 2.0

Web 2.0 technology helps the financial firm’s call-center agents get better information to clients faster, proving its mettle for more widespread use

As vice president of T. Rowe Price Associates, Kirk Kness is responsible for using technology innovatively for the Baltimore-based investment company. In past positions with T. Rowe he was involved in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects, but these days he’s busy implementing relatively low-cost, Web 2.0-based collaboration tools including wikis and blogs. 

The company’s goal in using Web 2.0 is to gather intelligence more effectively companywide as it’s created, and make it easy to find, share and use — perhaps even in ways the company has yet to envision.

What specific Web 2.0 applications do you have in place?

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As vice president of T. Rowe Price Associates, Kirk Kness is responsible for using technology innovatively for the Baltimore-based investment company. In past positions with T. Rowe he was involved in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects, but these days he’s busy implementing relatively low-cost, Web 2.0-based collaboration tools including wikis and blogs. 

The company’s goal in using Web 2.0 is to gather intelligence more effectively companywide as it’s created, and make it easy to find, share and use — perhaps even in ways the company has yet to envision.

What specific Web 2.0 applications do you have in place?

We have the Confluence wiki platform [from Atlassian Software] in place in our call center. We have [Jive Software's] Jive Forums [discussion forum] platform in place. We have pockets of instant messaging rolled out. We’re starting to look at another layer of instant messaging called persistent instant messaging, which is a product called MindAlign that Microsoft just bought.

Click to see: Kirk Kness bio

But it’s not really about the tools; it’s more about what you get from the tools. The real value that we’re trying to get — and what I’m trying to drive towards — is in context with these tenets that describe what Web 2.0 is supposed to bring to an enterprise: harnessing collective intelligence, discoverability, low-barrier tools, emergent structures, collaboration, unintended use and community. They are the factors that we’re really starting to try to figure out. How can we drive to those using these different tools? What can they bring us?

Let’s start by explaining that first one, harnessing collective intelligence.

That’s the ability to actually gather the tacit or the implicit knowledge and bring it together. So, in the context of collaboration, how can we create tools, how can we put in place models that allow people to collaborate who maybe naturally wouldn’t collaborate? I don’t believe that if you put a tool out there, and you say, ‘Everybody collaborate now, because it’s for the better of the company’ that it’s actually going to happen. You collaborate around a community that forms naturally. And that’s the thinking that we’re trying to bring in to the enterprise. How can we better enable what I call “smart information” or making content smarter so that we can make our employees smarter? By making our employees smarter, we then ultimately make our clients more informed.

OK, how about the other tenets?

Discoverability is basically the ability to get the content into forms or formats so it can be discovered. That’s the linkable model that’s used on the Web, so everything is discoverable. If information is locked in an e-mail somewhere, it’s not discoverable. If it’s not discoverable, then it cannot create community.

Low-barrier tools are really important. We cannot create friction for our associates. With traditional Web content tools, it tends to be difficult to enter content. Wikis are public-authorship-type tools. It’s “what you see is what you get”. You may even have the ability to author content in Word, and then push a button and publish it out. That’s why blogs exploded — because [publishing] became easy. If you think about Web 1.0, it was about creating Web pages and knowing HTML. How many people do you know who have a blog also know HTML?